Untangling a great yarn

With apologies for adding to the expanding universe of words that are and will continue to be written about The Wire as more and more people succumb to the prosyletising of obsessives like me, The Wire untangled is my attempt to understand what this, surely the greatest television series ever made, teaches not about modern police work, drugs, politics or the dangers of drinking by the train tracks - but about storytelling.

For me this 60-hour epic has to rank among the the greatest works of narrative fiction. With Tolstoy's scale and Dostoyevsky's dystopianism, it's surely only a matter of time before someone much more qualified than me performs proper literary analysis on it. Nevertheless, if you'll excuse me, I'll write my blog anyway. It's a bit like the way children pick apart dandelions. The desire to understand my subject and how it works is there - but I'm mainly doing this because it's a fun thing to do.

And of course an excuse to watch the series again. This time, though, I'll be listening really carefully.